There is a new snake oil on sale and its name is Server Virtualization.

The salespeople at VMWARE and other server virtualization companies are really good at their jobs. Somehow they have convinced companies that virtualized server environments are better than bare metal installations. You must be kidding.

I have two clients that are using server virtualization.

The first is running a large SQL Server installation on a virtualized set of servers at a hosting company. This is a high availability and supposed to be a high performance system. My question is this: How are you ever going to be able to take full advantage of the hardware underlying your system if you have put a virtualization system over the operating system?